Category Archives: Egypt

An Egyptian groom who knocked his bride out by fracturing her skull just after their wedding told police he did so at his mother’s request to control his wife.

The unnamed groom said he took his wife to their new home just after wedding and slapped her three times as his mother told him.

“My mother said this would help me control my wife through our marital life. She warned me that my brothers are all controlled by their wives because they did not listen to her and hit their brides,” he said, according to Egypt’s ‘Al Bawaba News’ network.

“After I slapper her, she hit me back. I then went to the kitchen and brought a metal bar, which I used to hit her on the head and body.”

Police arrested the man on charges of causing serious injuries to his wife, who suffered from fractures in her skull and pelvis.

An Egyptian appeals court on Monday convicted a doctor of manslaughter and performing female genital mutilation that led to the death of a 13-year-old girl, sentencing him to two years and three months in prison in the country’s first case that came to trial over the widespread practice, defense lawyers said.

The doctor, Raslan Fadl, was initially acquitted of the 2013 death of Sohair el-Batea in a village in the Nile Delta province of Dakahliya. He was not present in court Monday and his whereabouts were unknown.

Monday’s verdict was “a triumph for women,” said lawyer Reda el-Danbouki, who represented the deceased. Egypt has one of the highest rates of female genital mutilation in the world and criminalized the practice in 2008, but it remains widespread.

A Health Ministry inspector testified Thursday in Egypt’s first-ever female genital mutilation (FGM) trial, saying a 13-year-old girl died after undergoing the procedure despite her doctor’s claims otherwise. FGM has been illegal in Egypt for six years, but activists say most Egyptian girls are still being circumcised, mostly in private clinics.

On an Egyptian talk show, women discussed female circumcision, also known as FGM. One woman said parents fear that if they don’t circumcise their girls for “purity” no one will marry them, or if they do, the new husband may force his bride to be circumcised on their wedding night.

But Suad Abu-Dayyeh, a Middle East and North Africa consultant for Equality Now says if a girl is circumcised she will never enjoy her sexual relationship with her husband, among other things.

“They might have infections, bleeding, pains, and also they will suffer all their lives,” she said.

Titled “Creepers on the Bridge,” the footage was uploaded to Vimeo on Aug. 30 and had attracted nearly 250,000 views by Wednesday evening. It is part of a documentary project, “The People’s Girls,” which Ghunim is working on with her co-director, Tinne Van Loon.

“This video shows what it’s like for a girl to walk alone in Cairo, no matter what time of day. Though the video only includes stares, it gives an idea of just how intimidating it can be in the street,” Van Loon, who is Belgian-American, wrote on Vimeo. “As a woman, Egyptian or foreign, comments and stares are the norm every time we step out the door, no matter what we’re wearing.”

A 2013 study from the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women found that 99.3 percent of Egyptian women and girls surveyed had experienced some kind of sexual harassment in their lifetime.

Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers recently went on a sexual assault and rape spree in Egypt as a way of “getting even” with those women who dared to celebrate the presidential victory of Abdel Fatteh al-Sisi—the former army chief who overthrew Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt.

On June 8, when tens of thousands of Egyptians congregated in Tahrir Square to celebrate Sisi’s inauguration, dozens of women were sexually assaulted and many more harassed. According to a statement later released by the Ministry of Interior, seven men between the ages of 15 and 49 were arrested for sexually assaulting “a number of women.”

One 19-year-old female student was especially brutalized—and videotaped as she was stripped naked and sexually assaulted by a throng of men. (I saw the graphic video on YouTube, though it has since been removed; a much less graphic clip of the initial assault appears here.) A gun-waving police officer eventually managed to rescue the woman from her ordeal, though after sustaining injuries himself.

Sexually harassing or raping those supportive of Sisi by way of “retribution” is not uncommon in Egypt. Earlier, a six-year-old boy was raped by a Muslim Brotherhood member who was “angered” at the child for singing praises to Sisi. He lured the boy into a shed, locked the doors, and proceeded to rape him, while saying, “You’re always holding pictures of this Sisi and singing his praises. Come, I’ll humiliate and break you—and your Sisi.”

A video of a woman being sexually assaulted at inaugural celebrations for Egypt’s new president has spotlighted a national epidemic, but activists believe that stopping such attacks will be difficult.

Graphic footage, apparently filmed on Sunday using a mobile phone, shows a mob of men surrounding the young woman, who was stripped of her clothes and badly bruised in the assault in Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square.

The video, shared widely on websites including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, triggered outrage in Egypt and abroad.

“Sexual assaults and rapes by mobs are now part of reality. How far will things go? This is sexual terrorism,” said Zeinab Sabet, a prominent activist with “Dignity Without Borders”, a group battling sexual violence.

“This has been happening since 2012… The fact that it happened again (on Sunday) shows that the authorities aren’t even bothered about us,” she told AFP.

In June of last year, a father and daughter arrived at a doctor’s office two hours north of Cairo. The father left his daughter, a cherub-faced girl of 13, in the custody of a doctor and a nurse.

“The nurse took my daughter out of the operation room to a nearby room, along with three other girls whom the doctor was circumcising,” the father, a farmer, told the Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm. “I waited half an hour, hoping that my daughter would wake up, but, unfortunately, unlike the rest of the girls, she did not.”

The doctor, Raslan Fadl, who also circumcised another girl in the family, allegedly offered the family 20,000 Egyptian pounds – about $2,800 — to keep quiet about her death. But they wouldn’t. And a health inspector’s report appeared to confirm their suspicions: 13-year-old Suhair al-Bata’a had died of “a sharp drop in blood pressure resulting from shock trauma.”

“I want nothing but to hold the doctor accountable and to have justice for my daughter,” Suhair’s mother said at the time. Today, nearly one year after her daughter’s death, that may finally happen. In what outside observers are calling a landmark case, the doctor will stand trial today on charges of violating a 2008 ban on female genital mutilation, an entrenched practice that removes the clitoris.

Abu Hurayrah said: I heard the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) say: “The fitrah is five things – or five things are part of the fitrah – circumcision, shaving the pubes, trimming the moustache, cutting the nails and plucking the armpit hairs.” Bukhari 5891; Muslim 527Narrated Umm Atiyyah al-Ansariyyah: A woman used to perform circumcision in Medina. The Prophet (peace be upon him) said to her: Do not cut severely as that is better for a woman and more desirable for a husband.Abu Dawud41:5251

And from the definitive Islamic sharia law manual: e4.3 Circumcision is obligatory (for every male and female) by cutting off the piece of skin on the glans of the penis of the male, but circumcision of the female is by cutting out the clitoris (this is called Hufaad) Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law

A doctor in Egypt is set to stand trial on Thursday in relation to the female genital mutilation (FGM) of a child who died of complications. It is the first attempt to prosecute over a procedure banned in Egypt since 2008.

Thirteen-year-old Soheir al-Batea, from the small northern village of Diyarb Buqtaris, succumbed to an allergic reaction to penicillin on June 6, 2013, allegedly after being cut by Dr. Raslan Fadl, according to forensic reports seen by Equality Now, an international rights NGO that has pushed for the prosecution.

The teenager’s death has formed what is being seen as a test case on the issue in a country where four in five young women reportedly undergo the procedure, despite the ban.

“When a woman goes swimming, as the word for sea is masculine, when “the water touches the woman’s private parts, she becomes an ‘adulteress’ and should be punished.”

– Summary of a report titled “The misguided Fatwas of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis”, as published in the Al Masry Al Youm.

A report by a committee set up by Al Azhar, one of the oldest and most prestigious Islamic universities in Cairo, to study the fatwas issued by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis reveals how Islamists view women.

According to the report, “the fatwas issued by both groups (the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis) regard women as strange creatures who are created solely for sex. They considered the voices of women, their looks and presence outside the walls of their homes an ‘offence’. Some even went as far as to consider women as a whole offensive.”

Another fatwa prohibited women from “eating certain vegetables or even touching cucumbers or bananas”, due to their phallic imagery which could lead women down the wrong path.

Another fatwa directed women to “turn off the air conditioners at home in the absence of their husbands as this could indicate to a neighbour that the woman is at home alone and any of them could commit adultery with her”.

Another fatwa orders that girls as young as 10-years-old be married “to prevent them from deviating from the right path”.

Another prohibited girls from going to school more than 25km away from their homes.

A strange one said that a couple’s marriage would be annulled if they copulate with no clothes on.

Egypt is the worst country for women in the Arab world, closely followed by Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen, according to gender experts surveyed in a Thomson Reuters Foundation poll released on Tuesday.

Comoros, Oman, Kuwait, Jordan and Qatar came top of the survey, which assessed 22 Arab states on violence against women, reproductive rights, treatment of women within the family, their integration into society and attitudes towards a woman’s role in politics and the economy.

The results were drawn from answers from 336 gender experts invited to participate in an online survey by the foundation, the philanthropic arm of the news and information company Thomson Reuters, in August and September.

Questions were based on key provisions of the U.N. Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which 19 Arab states have signed or ratified.

The poll assessed violence against women, reproductive rights, treatment of women within the family, their integration into society and attitudes towards a woman’s role in politics and the economy.

Experts were asked to respond to statements and rate the importance of factors affecting women’s rights across the six categories. Their responses were converted into scores, which were averaged to create a ranking.